Tracking the private jets of rich people has been a thing for a while, despite the best efforts of the planes’ owners to stop it, but artist and developer Kyle McDonald has come up with a novel use for the data: Using it to predict the end of the world.
The reasoning behind McDonald’s site Apocalypse Early Warning is twofold: a) if a nuclear apocalypse is imminent, the rich and powerful will hear about it before the rest of us, and b) if those people do get word that the missiles are en route, they’ll most likely jump in their planes and fly as far from major cities as possible. It’s hard to argue with either of these premises.
The site puts these ideas into practice by accessing the public FAA registration data for what it calls “a fixed cohort of business jets”—roughly 11,000 aircraft at the date of publication—and cross-referencing it with the real-time flight data site ADS-B Exchange. The acronym stands for “automatic dependent surveillance broadcast”, and it’s essentially a system whereby aircraft broadcast information about their location, heading, etc.
This allows air traffic controllers to track planes’ locations and pilots to be aware of which other aircraft are nearby. The system is used worldwide, and in the US, the FAA has made the technology a key part of its Next Generation Air Transportation System, describing it as “the preferred method of surveillance for air traffic control.” The whole point of ADS-B is that the information broadcast is available publicly, although a bill to “establish requirements and limitations regarding the use of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast data” is currently before Congress.
That bill focuses on the use of ADS-B data to assess landing and usage fees, an issue on which we frankly don’t feel qualified to comment. However, it does seem clear that “evaluating the possibility of the world ending” doesn’t appear to fall within the bill’s remit—good news for McDonald and his DIY eschatology site.
So how does the Apocalypse Early Warning site actually use the ADS-B Exchange’s data? The concept is pretty simple: it looks at how many of the planes that it tracks are in the air at any given moment, and asks whether that number is unusually high. To determine the answer, the site compares the current number to “a recent baseline for similar times of day and week,” based on the ADS-B Exchange’s historical data.
The difference between the number of planes in the air and the baseline value is then measured in standard deviations from that baseline value, providing a simple numerical representation of how unusual the current level of traffic is. That level is provided at the top of the site as an “Alert Level”, with five standard deviations and higher (i.e. an Alert Level of 5 or higher) being “an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse.”
This does raise the question of what to do with this information: clearly, if you trust McDonald’s reasoning, then seeing “5” at the top of the site should send you running for the hills. The real power move here, however, would be setting up some sort of script to put a whacking great Polymarket bet on the end of the world as soon as the alert level reaches 5. If it turns out the alert was a false alarm, you can console yourself with the fact that the world has not ended—and otherwise, then hey, at least you’ll be starting your very own in-person post-apocalyptic survival game with lots of lovely real money.
What? They only accept bottle caps now? Balls.
